This month is Women’s History Month and communication professor Sanjukta Ghosh’s Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Media class is working on a civic engagement project to help spread awareness on campus about women – specifically women of color.

The project is a scavenger hunt around campus where students will have to find posters that give brief biographies of women of color who have made an impact.

The posters will have clues that will lead participants to a location where they can find a crossword puzzle they can then fill out to possibly win a prize. The posters will be put up around campus on March 20 and prizes will be given out for completed crossword puzzles.

A second element of the project involves the class creating a series of short videos of interviews with African Americans about the moment they realized they were black, to raise awareness about how we affect the images of other races. 

The goal of these projects is to educate students about women of color who have made a difference.

Ghosh said she hopes the effort will help fight stereotypes placed on other races, such as Latinos, Blacks and Arabs, by educating the student body on what these women of different races have done for us.

  “I want the Castleton community to be an enlightened and engaged community in general,” Ghosh said.

Students in the class, Myles Riley and Breannon Meuse, say the projects are a great way to spread awareness and end stereotypes about other races, especially women of color.

Riley believes that these types of projects make students think about something real. Riley is working on the video project and will film interviews he is conducting with a few African American students about the moment they realized they were black, which will be later uploaded online.

“I think a lot of students will get something out of it, especially the more intuitive, people who are open-minded and going for something with the purpose of receiving information,” Riley said.

Meuse feels that the goals of this project have already been achieved for her in the research process.

“I gained a lot of new knowledge that I hadn’t previously known about various women (of color) and their roles in society,” Meuse said.

She said she hopes that this will be true for other students as well.

Ghosh believes that this type of information serves not only to spread awareness, but also to get students interested.

“I want students to have the same kind of wonderment they had as a child. I want them to ask, Who’s she? What did she do? Why is she famous and what should I know about her?” Ghosh said.

Meuse wants the same.

 “I hope they (students) become involved and take it upon themselves to learn more than they would have known having not participated or read the posters,” Meuse said.